


In A Strange Land

by fascinationex



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Inadvisable Laboratory Safety Practices, Medical Experimentation, Modern Character In Gaia, OC main character, POV First Person, Pre-Canon, Shinra Science, WIP - irregular updates, sir you're not authorised to be here, the Turks - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-19
Updated: 2019-08-19
Packaged: 2020-09-07 21:13:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,496
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20316103
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fascinationex/pseuds/fascinationex
Summary: A regular modern day office worker ends up in Gaia -- and the Shinra Electric Company. It is an era of SOLDIERs and people who genuinely believe that mako is the answer. What does a guy have to do to prevent, well, meteor?[Because I love fics where modern characters get to go and explore parts of canon.]





	In A Strange Land

“There,” said a man sitting with me, jabbing his finger at our shared screen. His nail clicked against it.  
  
The image on the screen froze at the same time as I blinked. It was a freeze frame of a man being interrogated -- either that, or a set up for a pretty intense BDSM scene.  
  
For a second I didn’t understand quite what had happened. It seemed as though someone had leaned over me and my screen had changed to that weird image. I frowned and looked sideways at the man, because nobody at my office really knew me well enough to be showing me torture _or_ porn. Both were kind of not safe for work, by my definition.  
  
So I looked over to him, frowning, and --  
  
I didn’t... know the man.  
  
A second later, I realised I also did not know the office. The desk was oriented differently in the room, and the walls were painted a very pale blue instead of the pastel green I expected. The light was all wrong, glaring bright and cold overhead with very few windows. I glanced further around. Everyone -- and I did mean everyone -- was wearing very similar dark suits in the exact same shade, like a strange and expensive uniform.  
  
I felt different, too. My hair was a strange weight at the back of my head, and the heft and weight of my body felt... odd.  
  
This wasn’t right.  
  
_Snap, snap._ The stranger sitting next to me snapped his fingers. “Hey. Are you in there?”  
  
I returned my attention to him. He was wearing the same dark suit as the rest, but his was sloppy, intentionally so -- no tie, shirt untucked, collar lopsided and left open. He had dark glasses propped up in his hair, keeping it more or less out of his eyes. The only other immediate impression was that his hair was red -- red like carnations, the kind of red that had to have come out of a bottle. He’d done his eyebrows, too, so I guessed he was pretty dedicated to the aesthetic.  
  
“Um,” I said slowly. My heart was racing. What the fuck was going on?  
  
“Shit,” said the guy, suddenly scowling fiercely. “They said this wasn’t gonna happen again. Boss,” he yelled, much more loudly. “I’m taking Pen down to the labs.”  
  
_Labs?_  
  
“Again?” I twitched at how unexpectedly close the new voice was, and twisted in my seat to see another suited man. This one was short, with slightly darker skin and neat black hair. Actually everything about him seemed almost preternaturally neat, from his starched collar to his polished shoes.  
  
“Yes, I see,” he said, which was when I realised he’d been looking at me while I’d been staring at his shiny shoes on the brink of absolute panic. “See if you can speed them up a bit this time.”  
  
I blinked back to Red Hair, to whom this comment was surely addressed, and found him wearing a sly little smile. I did not feel good looking at that smile.  
  
“I’ll see what I can do,” he promised, getting to his feet. There was a little tap-tap as he did and I glanced down to see him tapping a baton idly against the swell of one lean-muscled thigh. I swallowed.  
  
“Wait,” I interrupted. “What’s going on? Do I...” Obviously I knew them, since they clearly both knew me. I hunched. And what did they even mean by labs? I’d seen enough bad SF dramas to consider that a very bad sign. Labs.  
  
The neat one -- Boss, apparently -- gave me a brief once-over. He had all the facial expression of a blank monitor.  
  
“You’re not in danger,” he said, which was perhaps less reassuring than he’d intended, since it made me less stressed about how confused I was in this unfamiliar place and more stressed about the possibility of being in danger. Nobody had been talking about _danger_ until he'd brought it up!  
  
Red’s hand landed on the back of my neck. It was unexpectedly warm. “This has been happening. We know the labs --” he eyed me, squinting a little, “--the _medical_ labs,” he clarified, and, right, okay, medical, good start, “can fix it. Temporarily. Let’s go, yo. You’ll feel better.”  
  
“I want him back at work before midday,” said Boss.  
  
“Sure, sure,” said the redhead, “let’s move.”  
  
I got up and suddenly realised I was taller than everyone. I had never been a big guy, but somehow I towered over Boss and I had easily several inches on the redhead. Were they short, or was I just enormous?  
  
I pushed the chair in and found I didn’t recognise my hands, either. They were big, and had unfamiliar calluses. I licked my lips, looking down at them where their fingers curled over the back of the chair. I was used to finer bones and more, different, scars. Where my own hands had burns dotting them in long spotty tracks from my wrist up my thumb, these had white marks over the knuckles and old nicks on the insides of my fingers.  
  
Red was stronger than he looked. He had no problem forcing me on my way by means of a hard shove. My whole body moved under the pressure of it, and mine did not seem to be a small body here.  
  
The small office opened onto a long corridor lined with doors that were all labelled things like ‘56B’ and ‘34J’. It wasn’t very clear what was going on behind any of them. There were windows on one side of the walkway but the light from outside had a disturbing green cast, and when I paused to glance out through one of them, the sky was low and heavy. The light was strange because the clouds were... also kind of green.  
  
The city below was utterly unrecognisable. It was concrete and metal. I couldn’t see anything growing down there -- not a park, not an installation on top of a shorter building, not a single potted plant or streetside tree. I was high up enough that I might have been missing something, but the overall impression was of -- concrete, metal, the uncertain flicker of neon drowned out by daylight. And everything all cast beneath a soft greenish smog.  
  
“C’mon,” said Red. Despite the presence of mildly worrying weaponry -- and a distinctly, er, well, he had a stereotypically _organised crime-looking_ sense of style, if I was honest, which sort of threw the uniform dark suits everyone else was wearing into question and made me feel, shall we say, _unsettled_ \-- he still seemed friendly. “You can sightsee later, yo. If you still even want to.”  
  
“Sorry,” I said, and followed again without protest. My shoes, which felt like they actually might be boots given their ankle support, made a hard _click click_ on the floors. “So, uh, we’re going to see a doctor?”  
  
Everything felt very jumbled and a medical doctor did not necessarily seem like a bad idea right then. I remembered my own life, of course -- my office, my co-workers, my boring reporting spreadsheets and unhelpful clients. I’d heard the specific ring of my desk phone so many times I sometimes heard it in my sleep. This... was not even the right city. Forget the city, actually, this was not even the right _body_. It was taller and it moved differently and my scars weren’t right. I was wearing a suit I’d never even seen, let alone purchased, before -- one which certainly felt more expensive than anything I could afford...  
  
And every time I went to adjust my glasses, wary of this feeling that they weren’t sitting right on my face and were about to fall off, I was suddenly aware that I wasn’t wearing any -- even though I could see.  
  
Everything felt very, very wrong.  
  
“Sorta,” agreed Red, pausing and jabbing a button for a lift. The baton in his hand clanged against the wall. Making such a loud noise in such a quiet space didn’t seem to faze him. “You’ve been doing some new kind of treatment. The memory shit’s just side effects.”  
  
Treatment for what, I wondered. My coworker here - or, I guessed he was, because he was wearing the same uniform and seemed to report to the same person -- acted like he knew me, and like what he called 'memory shit’ had been going on for some time.  
  
Everything did seem terribly real. Perhaps that other place, with its familiar studio apartment and dull office and distant friends, perhaps that was some kind of dream or imagining? Gingerly I touched the wall. It was cold and textured under my fingertips.  
  
The door of the lift swished open and Red gestured for me to precede him inside.  
  
I stepped into the doorway and then stopped. The back wall of the elevator was mirrored, and my stomach dropped at the strange sensation of looking right into a mirror but not seeing myself there.  
  
But I was there, of course. I took a deep breath and another step in. One of the men in the mirror moved with me. I licked my lips and squeezed my eyes shut against the swooping clench of my guts. Okay. It was okay. I didn’t...  
  
Red must have hit a button because the doors swooshed closed and the elevator began to move. I forced my eyes open and approached the mirror.  
  
About the only thing that seemed the same was that I was still kind of, uh, chubby. The weight sat better on this taller body, but I was definitely soft. It probably did not help that I was standing next to Red, who was a really lanky kind of guy, all limbs and angles and lean surprising muscle. But my hair was coal black instead of medium brown and my face was... well, I had a strong jaw and a wide, fiercely frowning mouth. My eyes were black, or so dark a brown that the difference didn’t matter. I brushed a spill of dark hair away from my face -- it was _long_, I realised, dangling in a plait between my shoulderblades. What even...  
  
My nose was crooked. It had been broken. There was a scar on my jaw.  
  
I tried a smile. One tooth was chipped. It was not a welcoming expression. I let it drop.  
  
Next to me, Red snorted. “You do that every time, too. The others’d shit themselves if they knew you ever smiled.”  
  
I glanced at him in the mirror. He looked relaxed, arms crossed, baton dangling from one hand like an afterthought. I bit my lip, not thinking yet about how ridiculous such an expression must seem on my face.  
  
“I must know it’s a pretty ugly expression on me, normally, then,” I said lightly.  
  
His eyes narrowed. “Probably,” he said, and smiled. His smile wasn’t exactly winning any awards for trustworthiness, either.  
  
I stared into the mirror the whole way down. Red Hair seemed amused by the faces I was making into it at least. I could hardly tear my eyes away. Twice the doors of the elevator swooshed open on our long descent and twice the people waiting outside them peered inside and paused and declined to get inside with us.  
  
The second time, I checked to make sure my fly was done up and I didn’t look like some kind of -- well, not like a kind of guy with whom you wouldn’t want to share a lift. I couldn’t see anything obviously wrong.  
  
“Am I doing something wrong?”  
  
Red laughed.  
  
“It’s the suit,” he said.  
  
I peered at it. It was a nice suit -- a blue so dark it looked black in most lights, but seemed navy where the overhead lights of the elevator caught it. Comfortable. Easy to move in. Despite my general shape, it fit across the shoulders and chest and waist equally well.  
  
“I like the suit,” I said slowly, feeling as though I was not quite catching on to something.  
  
“Yep.” His smile grew teeth.  
  
At the next stop someone did actually get on: a huge man in a vaguely military uniform. I didn’t actually recognise the uniform, but I was hardly an expert on either uniforms or militaries. He had black hair and eyes so blue they seemed to glow -- and muscles like you would not believe. I stared at the clench of them in his arm when he leaned forward to push a button on the elevator’s panel. My mouth went kind of dry.  
  
The bare arms were a... good uniform choice. Yes.  
  
I was staring. I yanked my gaze away -- as a rule, I tried not to get caught staring at the bodies of men who could crush me one-handed -- and back to my own strange face in the mirror. But I didn’t quite manage it before catching Red’s eye. He raised one eyebrow at me, still smiling, and I scowled harder. _Nope_.  
  
At least I knew not everyone was going to avoid a room just because I was in it now.  
  
The huge soldier got out at the same basement floor we did, and even walked ahead of us in the same direction part of the way.  
  
“Pretty, huh,” drawled Red. From the twitch of one of the soldier’s big heavy-muscled shoulders, he’d heard that, although I would have thought he was out of earshot.  
  
“Uh,” I said eloquently. Everyone I’d seen here was kind of pretty, if I was perfectly honest. But it didn’t seem like a good idea to agree when he could so clearly hear us.  
  
The soldier turned off a corridor before we did without ever looking back or talking to either of us, which... was probably for the better.  
  
The lab was... well, I felt that Red calling it a medical lab was probably overstating it. Even just the receiving area had a distinct mad scientist vibe.  
  
To the right was a tiny reception desk before an empty waiting area. The desk was manned by a pretty blonde in a neat skirt suit, who seemed more occupied with ticking something off than with new arrivals in her domain. To the left was a big 'DELIVERIES’ sign, beneath which were two huge tanks of glowing liquid and six empty steel crates -- the seventh contained a big, slavering dog-thing with too many tails and a huge hunch over its shoulders.  
  
It snarled as we stepped inside, and I saw its eyes were red. I twitched.  
  
On the far side of the room was a long bench against the wall, where a sink and several old-looking appliances sat. There was a tin of instant coffee that sat open next to something labelled 'acrylomide 98% microbiological grade’. Another staff member leaned against the bench in a stained lab coat, idly stirring his coffee with the end of a pipette.  
  
“Oh,” said the receptionist, looking up when I paused in the doorway. “Hello. You’ve not been summoned for an appointment..?”  
  
I thought that was a weird way of phrasing it. Summoned for an appointment, like they just called you down and decided for you when you were coming. I felt my eyes narrow uncertainly.  
  
“Don’t worry, Ainslow,” sighed the guy with the pipette in his coffee, “I’ve got it. Amnesia, right?” He looked decidedly displeased to see us. Not least, I thought, because he was clearly trying to take a coffee break and didn’t want to be interrupted by work.  
  
“Yep,” drawled Red. “Where’s the old man?”  
  
“The professor,” corrected Coffee Pipette Dude, “is busy with an assessment for Project S. But...” he turned around and pulled something out from under a big tub of whatever (CH3)3SiCN even was. It was something a bit like a tablet, but with a heavy-duty plastic case and a lot more glow. “He’s got some notes on this. Seems pretty sure about how to fix it. Peregrine, right?” he nodded at me. “You can follow me.”  
  
“He goes by Pen,” said Red. He twirled his baton in a graceful loop. It looked idle, but it drew attention to where the weapon hung from his fingers. “I’ll tag along. Bossman wants him back before twelve anyway.”  
  
Pipette Guy eyed the baton, then Red’s face. His expression did something complicated. I did not think the look he settled on was a happy one.  
  
“Fine. ...’Pen’, let’s see if we can get you in and out within a few hours.”  
  
I glanced toward Red, whose smile was fixed and pretty unfriendly. He obviously viewed the intervention of this guy as important, but just as obviously didn’t trust him. He gestured for me to go ahead in front of him. I hesitated.  
  
“C’mon,” Red said, shoving me in the shoulder again, “I don’t know about you but I don’t want to be late getting back.”  
  
With increasing trepidation I followed the guy in the lab coat down to the corridor. The caged monster dog whined sadly as we left.  
  
There were doors on both sides of this windowless corridor and I could hear yelling behind at leat one of them. We didn’t stop to investigate. We passed several doors.  
  
The room they led me to didn’t seem that intimidating at first. There was a padded medical bed, a desk in one corner, shelves and a sink set in a bench surrounded by a great many haphazardly stacked jars, tubs and phials of I-knew-not-what paraphernalia that gleamed and glowed strangely in the bright overhead lights. There was a tank, too, in the far corner -- a person-sized one with a glass front and a mask dangling from the outside. It was here that Pipette Guy focused.  
  
“The last attempt was at 1.2%... _ish_... concentration,” he explained, which actually did not explain anything at all, as he pulled on a pair of thick-looking gloves. He fiddled with a pot of something at the sink. The glow of it lit his face strangely. I noticed that he, like everyone here, seemed to have absolutely flawless skin. Weird. Was my face like that now? I couldn’t remember. “Professor Hojo’s said that if that didn’t fix it we’re to try a 5% concentration with the same serum.”  
  
That sounded like a big change in the concentration of whatever. I frowned. Professor Hojo, huh? I was reasonably sure there had to be multiple actual Hojos in existence, aside from the fictional one I immediately thought of, and of course one of those could also be a professor, but...  
  
It just seemed, uh, kind of ominous, you know?  
,  
“Concentration of what?” I asked, peering at the reservoir in the tank, which the guy was now filling. The stuff he was putting in was where that unholy glow originated.  
  
He clicked his tongue. “If we have to explain this to _you_ every time you come down here, we’ll never get anywhere.” He straightened and something in his spine gave a soft pop. “I don’t care about the rest of your clothes, but your shoes need to be off for this -- unless you want to run late,” he added, at my hesitation.  
  
I glanced back at Red. I should have asked his name, but I felt obscurely embarrassed about having to do so, so he was going to be Red until I figured it out from context or mysteriously remembered. He was still twirling the baton lazily through his fingers, but all his attention seemed to be on a tiny device in his hands, a phone or a pager or something.  
  
“You can explain to him while he’s undressing. You’re a doctor, right? You’re a smart guy. I’m sure you can multitask, yo.”  
  
The doctor scoffed in the back of his throat, but he did start talking while I gingerly removed my boots. They came up higher than I’d initially expected, secured tightly and ending halfway between my ankle and my knee. There was a big scar across the arch of my foot, mounded up and pale against the olive of my skin. I swallowed to see it. I had no idea where it’d come from.  
  
Maybe whatever this treatment was would fix that?  
  
“The mako concentration of five per cent is too high for most kinds of treatments, but your body has been developing a level of resistance -- and it’s a common natural substance anyway,” the doctor -- if he was a doctor, although Red seemed to think so -- went on, “so some exposure occurs doing the course of every day life anyway.”  
  
So, we were talking about some kind of chemical that was, uh, pretty common? Okay...  
  
This did not seem to explain his gloves, I thought, drawing off my shirt and then my belt and trousers. This body -- my body -- was enormous. It towered over the other two men in the room. I was, I realised, pretty heavily muscled myself, underneath that comfortable layer of fat.  
  
“The concentration used for the soldiers is twenty five and it’s even higher in the experimental projects. Humans don’t experience immediate danger until at least thirty per cent. Arm,” he added.  
  
I blinked stupidly at him for a moment, and then finally I held out my arm. He swabbed at the bend of my elbow, then peered closely for a second.  
  
“Make a fist.”  
  
Obediently, I did.  
  
“This would be easier if you lost some weight,” he said flatly. Somewhere behind me Red laughed.  
  
“I’ll take it under advisement,” I said, equally flat, and by which I meant ‘fuck off’.  
  
The injection pinched, but whatever was inside the syringe burned cold. I twitched.  
  
“That’s going to stop your memory going in and out on you... probably. The mako’s just to activate it. Pants off, and get in.”  
  
I peered down at my pants. I was already mostly naked, sure, but if there was anything I wanted to keep on --  
  
“Or leave them on, but you’re the one who’s going to have to sit in them.” He sniffed.  
  
That decided me. I clenched my teeth and shucked my briefs to pool in a pile on my trousers. At least they were clean.  
  
I tried to pretend I wasn't standing around naked in front of strangers -- with whom I apparently worked -- but I was not very successful. I clenched my jaw and glared right past the doctor's head while Red gave a low whistle somewhere behind me.  
  
I was just going to ignore that. I stepped over a low steel ledge and into the tank. The walls were very close.  
  
The doctor gave me a breathing apparatus that looked like a torture device and gingerly I secured its straps around my head. It covered my mouth and nose, soft and rubbery, and had a flexible tube that led outside the glass walls of the tank. Presumably that would keep me from drowning. It smelled faintly of something -- a cleaner of some kind.  
  
The cold burn of the injection was getting worse. I could feel my fingers beginning to twitch involuntarily.  
  
Then the tank clicked closed. Suddenly the glass was right in front of my masked face and the seal was giving a slow pneumatic hiss. I shuddered. I was very, very trapped in here now. My heart raced. I remembered that the elevation of my pulse was only going to spread whatever had been injected that much faster.  
  
There was a rushing sound and fluid began to pool around my toes. It rose rapidly, contained by the walls of the tank. The concentration may not have been dangerous but the fluid stung -- a kind of low-level irritation of my skin, a sting like ripping off duct tape too fast. This, then, explained the gloves. I gasped as it rose higher and higher and the air I could get through the tubing felt like -- not enough. My pulse rose and my heart thundered like it was trying to escape out through my throat. I saw stars.  
  
This was a bad idea, I thought distantly. This was some dystopian hellscape science bullshit, and it was a _terrible_ idea. I should not have --  
  
I reached out to the glass with one hand, moving slower through the thick fluid. Fuck this, my memory didn’t matter, I had to get _out_. It was close and dim and everything _hurt_ and I couldn’t get enough air --  
  
I slammed my hand against the glass. It held, and outside the doctor looked up and frowned and attached something new to my breathing tube, commenting, “That didn’t take as long as I expected.”  
  
Red seemed more or less unaffected. “He’s never great with the tanks,” he said neutrally.  
  
I slammed my hand into the glass one last time and it gave an uncertain creak but held firmly. And then my muscles went lax and unresponsive. My arm fell. The fluid reached my chin.  
  
It hurt, but my heart did not seem to have the energy to beat any harder. I was pretty sure I was drooling down the breathing tube.  
  
I had to shut my eyes, but I heard it when the rushing sound of the tank filling stopped entirely. I could feel my hair floating. Even that seemed to sting.  
  
“Are you going to wait in here?” the doctor asked, shockingly loud without that atmospheric rushing noise, even with the distortion of the liquid in which I was suspended.  
  
“Yeah,” I heard.  
  
He wasn’t leaving me. If I’d been able to sigh in relief, I would have. As it was, I continued drooling bonelessly into the tube.  
  
“Suit yourself. He’ll need at least an hour,” I heard. And then footsteps.  
  
An hour. My first thought was ‘oh no, a whole hour’ and then my second thought was more like ‘at least it’s only an hour’. At least Red seemed to be perfectly willing to stay here.  
  
I quickly figured out why he was so keen to hang around, and it wasn't to keep me company -- or at least, not _only_ to keep me company. It seemed to be primarily to snoop.  
  
“Doctors are meant to be all smart and shit, but that doesn’t mean they’ve got any common sense,” my redheaded coworker told me cheerfully, voice growing louder and softer with his movements.  
  
Next I heard the unmistakable sounds of someone riffling through the space -- a rustling of paper here, the slide of a drawer there, a clink somewhere much closer. “I know we got the security feeds and the paperwork and all that but there’s something about doin’ it the old fashioned way, you know? And these dummies write shit down that they’d never put on the servers...”  
  
That made sense. Securing the confidentiality of electronic records was significantly more resource-heavy than doing the same for paper. Paper was just... less convenient in pretty much every other way.  
  
I wanted to encourage him to keep talking but I could hardly move and the mask obscured most of my face. I didn’t dare open my eyes because the ‘mako’ stuff hurt badly enough where it only touched my skin, so I couldn’t even make eye contact and raise my eyebrow.  
  
Luckily, it so happened that Red had absolutely no problem filling the silence all on his own. He narrated his findings around the room and made several educated guesses about how new information might fit into what he already knew. And he knew a lot. This was a man who listened religiously for gossip and had every water cooler in the building bugged, and who obviously made a hobby of sorting out the truths and falsehoods from what he heard -- even if the information was of no earthly use to him. I learnt more in twenty minutes about his coworkers than I’d remembered about my own over the last ten years.  
  
He seemed delighted to have me as a captive audience, too. He certainly enjoyed the sound of his own voice.  
  
It did not make me feel any better. But it helped to have something to measure time against, and I couldn’t say I minded the company.  
  
I was pathetically grateful that he had not left me here to float, blind, naked and alone in this strange chemical soup in an unfamiliar room.  
  
Time passed, as time does. The stinging either grew less at the forty five minute mark, or I grew better used to it. It was difficult to say. I drifted, listening to my friendly colleague’s stream of only occasionally interrupted chatter.  
  
Finally, there came a clatter and a creak and a new set of footsteps. A voice, creaking a little, but harsh and male: “What are you doing in this room? Ah,” it went on. “I see, I see... more memory failure, yes? I had predicted as much. A failure. But he might still be put to work for you, I suppose. It’s not as though it’s his destiny to do anything truly challenging.”  
  
_What an asshole_, I thought, having gone past normal offence and almost crashed into disbelief. What kind of person just comes right out and says stuff like that?  
  
“Stand back, Turk--”  
  
The tank clicked and hissed and I felt the sudden weight of regular gravity press down upon me. My skin stung somehow even worse when it was exposed to the air gain. I shuddered with the raw prickling of it.  
  
My knees didn’t want to hold me. I sagged against the side of the tank.  
  
“Weakness!” crowed the voice, and I forced my eyes open. The light seemed bright after so long with them closed.  
  
As expected, it stung. My vision blurred before it cleared.  
  
He was hunched, middle aged, skinny. His forehead was creased. His hair was a long sleek tail. He had very round glasses and a shirt below his lab coat and...  
  
It was weird because it turned out that Professor Hojo looked weirdly, exactly like _Professor Hojo_, you know. That one. He even sounded right, if I thought about it, which was so bizarre.  
  
I blinked slowly.  
  
“Professor,” said a new, deep voice.  
  
I followed it with my flinching eyes to the doorway, where stood a man I had not heard coming. He was toweringly tall, broad shouldered and long limbed, and with a symmetry of feature and a smoothness of complexion that seemed frankly improbable. I’d never seen a real human being look so airbrushed. He had cat-green eyes, softly backlit, and a sweeping fall of silvery hair, which --  
  
Oh.  
  
I knew what I was looking at.  
  
I swallowed hard. What the fuck. My eyes went from him to Hojo and back. And then to the pool of liquid still clinging to my toes. Mako. _Mako_-mako, not like some mysterious chemical of medial purpose Id never heard of. Like, _Gaia_-mako.  
  
Planet blood. I toed it uncertainly.  
  
“Sephiroth,” said Hojo indifferently, “you may go. I’ll summon you when I have need of you again.”  
  
“Very well.” With one last disinterested glance around the room he turned and left in a swish of leather and silvery hair.  
  
I looked back at Red, even as I yanked the breathing mask from my face. It clicked. “_Reno_?”  
  
“There,” said Hojo, who seemed more interested in preparing a syringe than actually looking at either of us. “You see, his memory is restored. Even with the meanest of materials, my genius prevails. Arm,” he added, and when I did not move fast enough he grabbed my arm to speed up the process.  
  
Hojo’s fingers were icy but he had no difficulty finding the vein to draw from. He capped off five tubes of blood before he let me go.  
  
I opened my mouth to say:_ like fuck my memory was restored what the fuck was going on, I still had no goddamn idea --_  
  
And then I shut it again.  
  
I didn't know what was going on, no, but I knew enough to know I wanted to get out of the labs and well away from Hojo. That might be enough to be going on with.  
  
“Yep,” I agreed. “Tseng said he wanted us back by twelve, right?” I hoped that _had_ been Tseng. That would make sense.  
  
Hojo, having reduced his failed experiment (that was to say, me) to a series of tubes of fluids, was immediately disinterested in me. As this was exactly what I wanted, I did not go out of my way to draw any further attention. I pulled my clothes on as quickly as I could while the professor communed with my blood samples, and then I got to follow Reno right out of the lab and into the hallways of the Shinra building.  
  
I breathed a sigh of profound relief, even as I uncomfortably tugged my dry collar away from my still-damp skin.  
  
“You do remember, huh,” drawled Reno. “I wasn’t sure.”  
  
I hesitated. What to say? “Uh... bits. It’s coming back. I’m sure I’ll get there.”  
  
“Hmm?” he hummed. Then, “Ah... I get it. 'Cause even if you don’t, you don’t want to go back to the labs anyway,” he predicted cynically.  
  
Well... What else could I say? “...Yes,” I admitted.  
  


**Author's Note:**

> I've been meaning to put this one up for ages but kind of dithering about it. 
> 
> If you liked something about this instalment, and you feel like commenting, drop me a comment down below. Otherwise have a nice... day? night? time?


End file.
